As technology races ahead at break-neck speed, products are becoming more complex and consumers are becoming more demanding. Corporate customers are demanding assembled-to-order and engineered-to-order products that fit their exact requirements and manufacturers are having to respond. To succeed, today’s sales professionals need to do more than tout the individual features of their products and make price comparisons with the competition. Instead, salespeople must act as a trusted advisor to clients and prospects - helping them to design their unique needs, selecting the right elements to meet those requirements, and developing a customized solution that is an exact match to the objectives of the customer. In many situations, sales professionals need to be consultants to their customers. With the demand for engineered-to-order products come the complexities of non-standardization:

The engineering department must be consulted regarding technical considerations The engineering department must re-calculate both the material requirements and the operational requirements New drawings must be generated The engineered-to-order product must be correctly costed to arrive at an accurate selling price When the sale is made the manufacturing department must be warned of changes in the standard bill of material and routing

It is immediately obvious that this process can take days and weeks to complete and it means that the salesperson is unable to deliver a quotation to the customer until the end of the process. Furthermore, the salesperson is unable to conduct a consultative sales process. Until recently this lag and complexity in the engineer-to-order environment was accepted by manufacturers as symptomatic of offering customers choice.

 What is a Parametric Configurator?

Parametric configurators have burst onto the manufacturing marketplace and this emerging technology is radically changing the way manufacturers respond to customers’ requirements for engineered-to-order products. A parametric configurator is a sales tool that allows a non-engineering salesperson to accurately configure an engineered-to-order product and to accurately cost the product based on the bill of material and operations. The parametric configurator is able to generate the engineering drawing as well as 3D renderings . All of these functions may now be done in seconds, rather than weeks. Furthermore, as the parametric configurators allow non-engineering users to correctly configure and price a product, some manufacturers are publishing their configurators on the web for the customers’ use.

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Last modified: November 09, 1997